Kelly's+Page

o What it is : WikiTravel

o How to integrate it into your curriculum: WikiTravel is a wonderful model of an open source platform where one can write and learn about different places in the world. In teaching Biblical Israel I think I could use this models in order to help students learn about the travels of Bnei Yisrael in the Tanach. Students can be assigned different locations in Tanach and they have to figure out the psukim in which that place appears, and gather any information they can about the place or the role that the place played in the journey of Bnei Yisrael. They would then create a page on a class wiki, modeled after WikiTravel. This could be done at home or at school and could be shared as a resource to other Tanach learners of any ages. Wikispaces would allow the students to do this with ease. Since there are so many places this is a project that many students or years of students could contribute to. It could be linked with Google Earth, with Google Images. Students could also research flora and fauna or an area, or draw pictures and maps that could be uploaded. The differentiation potential is extensive as is the potential for group and individual work.

o Tips and techniques - Familiarize the students with the platform itself before having them replicate it. Have the students look up a place that they are interested and see what kind of information they learn. - Ability to teach concordance skills to see all of the instance of place names occurring.

One of my central goals as an educator and especially as an elementary school educator is to respect and foster the social-emotional growth of my students. My main tools for doing this, as a Judaic studies teacher, are the Torah and our traditions. If we are not using Torah to teach our students to be better people, people who respect themselves and others, then I feel we are missing the point. I also believe as an educator that the medium is the message. The way in which we teach our students must match in goals with what we are teaching our students. In a world where students live immersed in technology we must bring that into our classrooms in order to make our classrooms relevant and vibrant learning spaces. Technology, whether it is SMARTboards, blogs, wikis, etc. are not tools that we can ignore in today’s world. This medium of teaching Judaism and Jewish text to our students, though, must also stay true to the message of our classrooms.This self respect and respect for others that we teach to our students in the Judaic studies classroom, must be explicitly translated into how we teach our students to engage with the technology around them. Students who grow up in a world where Facebook is a given and privacy is not must engage with this world in a way that is in line with the Jewish values that we are teaching. The on-line community, then, becomes an extension of the classroom community, with all of its values and thoughtfulness, in terms of how the students present themselves and interact with one another and the broader world. I have spent this year developing a curriculum, using //Sefer Bamidbar// as a way to teach issues of speech ethics – and, for our digital native students, their online presence is one of the main foci of the application of those ethics. The ways in which technology is engaged in the context of the classroom must mirror those ethics, and must model the kind of technological engagement we expect of our students in the rest of their lives.